Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder

Background: At a time of increasing disconnectedness from nature, scientific interest in the potential health benefits of nature contact has grown. Research in recent decades has yielded substantia...

https://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/pubs/journals/pnw_2017_frumkin001.pdf

Nature Contact and Human Health: A Research Agenda

Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Synthesis

Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System

Beyond GDP: Measuring and achieving global genuine progress

Natural ecosystems perform fundamental life-support services upon which human civilization depends. However, many people believe that nature provides these services for free and therefore, they are of little or no value. While we do not pay for them, we pay significantly for their loss in terms of wastewater treatment facilities, moratoriums on greenhouse gases, increased illnesses, reduced soil fertility and losses in those images of nature that contribute to our basic happiness. Little is understood about the well-being benefits of the natural environment and its ecosystem services. The interwoven relationship of ecosystems and human well-being is insufficiently acknowledged in the wider philosophical, social, and economic well-being literature. In this article, we discuss an approach to examine human well-being and the interactions of its four primary elements—basic human needs, economic needs, environmental needs, and subjective well-being—and ecosystem services.

/pdf/a-review-of-the-elements-of-human-well-being-with-an-2tlyvw1nto.pdf

A review of the elements of human well-being with an emphasis on the contribution of ecosystem services.

Relating ecoystem services to domains of human well-being: Foundation for a U.S. index

Natural ecosystems perform fundamental life-support services upon which human civilization depends. However, many people believe that nature provides these services for free and therefore, they are of little or no value. One nearly forgotten ecosystem service is ecotherapy – the ability of interaction with nature to enhance healing and growth. While we do not pay for this service, we pay significantly for its loss resulting in slower recovery times, greater distress, reduced well-being and losses in those images of nature that contribute to our basic happiness. Little is understood about the ecotherapy benefits of the natural environment and its ecosystem services. The complex and interactive relationship of ecosystems, their services and human well-being is poorly acknowledged in the broad social, philosophical and economic well-being literature. In this article, we examine the role of nature and its ecosystem services in ecotherapy and its associated enhancement of recovery from physical and mental illness.

/pdf/ecotherapy-a-forgotten-ecosystem-service-a-review-44e1qmh3ev.pdf

Ecotherapy - A Forgotten Ecosystem Service: A Review.

A sustainable world is one in which human needs are met equitably and without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Human well-being is described by four primary elements—basic human needs, economic needs, environmental needs, and subjective well-being. These elements can interact in a myriad of ways to influence overall well-being. What makes changes in human well-being sustainable for a population or a nation? Two major interactional concepts can push changes in human well-being toward a sustainable state in space and time—social equity and intergenerational equity. The concept of social equity distributes well-being over space, ensuring the fair treatment of all members of society promoting spatial sustainability of a well-being decision. The concept of intergenerational equity distributes well-being through time, ensuring the well-being of present and future generations of a population or nation, promoting temporal sustainability of a well-being decision. The roles of social and intergenerational equity in terms of their influence on human well-being are examined with a focus on more sustainable decision-making.

The Role of Social and Intergenerational Equity in Making Changes in Human Well-Being Sustainable

The need to make informed decisions that move us toward a more sustainable future is increasingly recognized. The complex social, economic and ecological trade-offs involved in seeking sustainable solutions pose many challenges, notably the lack of information providing a systemic understanding of the linkages between decisions and actions and subsequent changes in community dynamics. By extension, decisionmakers frequently fail to fully understand and account for the comprehensive environmental, human health, economic, and social consequences of decisions. Wellbeing measures are often used in descriptions of observed outcomes related to policy decisions yet rarely do these measures represent wholly integrated metrics culled from a cross-section of all relevant community sectors (Diener et al. 2008). Even fewer consider what people value in the context of wellbeing and decision-making. As a consequence, many existing wellbeing indices are developed solely within the context of professional expertise. The exclusion of relevant non-expert or public perception often culminates with wellbeing measures that are heavily influenced by what professionals expect rather than representing an approximation of reality. In a broader sense, public perception helps to further underscore the drivers of social norms and the perceived impacts of decision-making on wellbeing. We are currently developing an approach for calculating a humanwellbeing index that will become a predicted endpoint for a decision support tool that bundles relevant service flow measures from capital-based modules (e.g., social-capital, economiccapital, and natural-capital). The integratedmodules, as described by Summers et al. (2012) and Smith et al. (2013), are intended to reflect the degree to which changes in service provisioning influence overall human wellbeing. The structural framework for creating this index has been developed to account for societal values (public perception) associated with these services relative to wellbeing. This paper describes the development and demonstrates the use of relative importance values as contribution weights that integrate professional opinion and public perception to help elucidate the linkages between economic, social and ecosystem services and wellbeing. We use ecosystem services, broadly defined as the products of ecological functions or processes that directly or indirectly contribute to human wellbeing, or have the potential to do so in the future (World Resources Institute 2003; Brown et al. 2007; Nicholson et al. 2009), as an example for developing these weighting factors based on their relationships to the domains and elements described in Table 1. The contribution weights are intended to be used in the construction of a U.S. human wellbeing index (HWBI) and to develop wellbeing production functions.

James K. Summers

Papers

A review of the elements of human well-being with an emphasis on the contribution of ecosystem services.

Relating ecoystem services to domains of human well-being: Foundation for a U.S. index

Ecotherapy - A Forgotten Ecosystem Service: A Review.

The Role of Social and Intergenerational Equity in Making Changes in Human Well-Being Sustainable

Development of Relative Importance Values as Contribution Weights for Evaluating Human Wellbeing: An Ecosystem Services Example